Fear of Letting Go

QA155 QUESTION: I am now allowing myself and others total freedom. The effect has been staggering. It feels like being on a new planet. I believe this step is necessary and will lead me to my salvation. However, I have noticed two things at different times. One is a divine feeling of freedom and bliss, and the other is a crushing feeling of anxiety, guilt and insecurity. What more can you tell me about this state of being?

ANSWER: All right, I will be very glad to have some things to say here. But first, for the enlightenment of those who hear your question, so as to avoid any possible misunderstanding, I want to clarify that by total freedom you do not mean license to act out destructive impulses, for some people may misunderstand this. And I want to make clear that you do not mean this.

QUESTION: No, by total freedom I mean everything I feel or want to feel, want to do, and of course, take the consequences.

ANSWER: Right. You mean that you permit the other person to be himself; you, on a very subtle emotional level, no longer make demands like the child of “mother, you must do what I want, otherwise I am lost.” You let them be, whether or not you like what they choose; you grant them the right to be themselves.

That is a tremendous milestone on the road from infant to childhood to maturity. By the same token, you give yourself the same right, which, as I said, does not mean acting out destructively. It means, “This is what I feel – whether this is right or wrong – this is me now.” The more you can do this with yourself, the more you can do it with others, and vice versa.

Now, what I have to say here is this. The problem is the occasional recurrences of anxiety you have. This is very understandable, because such a transition cannot be made in one sweep. There is the old little self, the childish self, that is burdened with all the misconceptions that say, “It is bad to feel this; it is bad to do that for myself; and I must not have pleasure, because pleasure is even dangerous. So, I must not allow myself even to admit certain desires.”

If these desires come, nevertheless, anxiety sets in immediately. By the same token, this little child says, “If others don’t do what I want, then I will be lost. And therefore, I must hate them and I must prohibit their freedom.” When you let them have their freedom – or your own – the old anxiety will come up.

Basically, this anxiety, to bring it down to the most profound level – the level where you can immediately resolve the problem and not bother with the in-between levels, for I think you can go there now – is the intense fear you have if you let go and let that inner being come out of you. Again, this is universal, I might say, and varies only in degrees and the way it may manifest. The intense fear you have is not of the negative feelings. These are a result of that fear of the pleasure.

You fear letting go and letting that inner being come out of you, and then responding to this innermost spontaneous being instead of the outer superimposed levels of self – either of intellect or of what you think should be or of the neurotic layers. This fear is what creates the anxiety.

Let me put it this way: the pleasure feelings themselves turn into the anxiety. Each time you can let go of the anxiety, you have that blissful state. Each time – by old habit in your soul substance – you pull back, you withdraw back, something in you falls back and says, “Oh no, no, no, I must not; this is dangerous.” Each time that happens, the pleasure feelings turn into anxiety.

Nothing seems to require as much courage as the pleasure supreme, which is what the created entity is meant and destined to experience if it is uninterfered with and undistorted. At first, it seems to require courage. And you have to muster courage again and again. “I let go, and I let myself be in pleasure. And I allow myself to dispense with the old rules or the ‘I must’ and ‘you should’ and ‘I should,’ and maybe all these rules are wrong, and I let be what is there.”

The moment you let be, you do not cringe away from what is. You may recall here the lecture I have given a very short time ago [Lecture #154 Pulsation of Consciousness]. When you do not cringe away from what is, you immediately experience the universal state of bliss that is not reserved for a life after death. It is available any minute in any human being’s life, right here and right now.

But you must also be realistic and understand that this transition cannot be done with one sweep. It fluctuates, and all you can do is observe your own fluctuation, and that is the best thing in the world to overcome. Do not be angry and impatient with yourself when you do fall back. It is inevitable. It cannot be done any other way.

You succeed, you feel it for a while, and then you have to go back. It is the inner reflexes that cannot yet be immediately controlled. The way you can come to control them is by connecting with them. You can only connect with them when you allow them too to be and do not push them away.

In other words, when you can encounter this in you in that same open spirit of “let there be what is,” which will perhaps in practice look something like, “Oh yes, here I resist. Here I’m still in fear. I lock myself up; I withdraw.” Then you will be connected with it. And then it will be easier and easier to open up. This is a new beginning of a very new phase. It is, indeed, a beautiful vista to behold. A new land must open up when people go there. Is that clear?

QUESTION: Yes it is. I want to say I have tried this dialogue with this child in me. It has helped me a great deal, so that I could easily act mature on the outside and just speak to this child.

ANSWER: Yes, right! That is a very good process I had suggested already so long ago and unfortunately people forget it. It is good at this point to remind all of you: do not repress the child. Nor do you need to completely identify with it, because you’re not only that child.

So therefore, encounter it and talk with it. Have a dialogue with it; see it manifest and listen to it. Then you speak without pushing it, without coercing it; but just see its expressions for what they are worth.

QUESTION: Well, I also wanted to say that the anxiety I experience comes more with allowing the freedom to others. As far as allowing myself to feel, that was a new revelation that I could also be free – I do not feel anxious about that.

ANSWER: Oh yes you do. On a still more unconscious level, there is a great amount of anxiety there of allowing yourself full pleasure and also full freedom. This word must be properly understood. It must be understood again and again.

It is often used in the sense of license. It must be understood in the sense that only he who is fully self-responsible is capable of utilizing the freedom Creation has granted all beings. The child that refuses self-responsibility, who wants to have his cake and eat it too, who wants to have continually an existence of being nurtured and being taken care of, is unable to use freedom.

The word does not mean license to express destructiveness all over the place – to express himself not in a healthy but in an unhealthy way, in a way where others are harmed and damaged and hurt.

Only he who is fully self-responsible, who inwardly and emotionally – as well as outwardly and materially – stands on his own two feet, is capable of the freedom that the world is wide open. Everything he wants is available, and that freedom is so staggering – and perhaps even at first frightening.

But to the degree the responsibilities of maturity are accepted in the deepest sense of the word, this total freedom opens up. The immature and ignorant child believes self-responsibility means confinement. Of course it is exactly the opposite. The confinement is the insistence of being taken care of, of not being made accountable for his own actions – of not being made accountable for his own cause and effect. This kind of freedom, of course, is still frightening to you, somewhere. You’re beginning to glean some of it.

QUESTION: Can you just say one thing about what this blissful state is? I know the anxiety but the blissful state seems almost unbelievable.

ANSWER: It is. It is. I would like to say whatever I can say, but it is so difficult. The human language is so limited that it is almost impossible to express these things, because they then sound trite. The words cannot do it justice. But what I would like to say, perhaps, at the moment about this is the following.

Usually when this is discussed, people associate this state with a sort of otherworldliness. The as-usual spirituality means to them a state up in the heavens – and that is the greatest misunderstanding.

In a sense, it is a tragedy, because that splits off and makes the realization of the spiritual destiny of man impossible as long as he thinks that way – as long as he separates the body from the spirit, as though these were two incompatible units.

The blissful state is taking place in the human body – the spirit, the mind, the emotions, and the body. There is in the middle of the body where the solar plexus is – a nucleus of energy that comes from what we refer to as, for lack of a better word, the real self or the divine spark.

It is immediately accessible in the body and can – and must – be experienced in the body. Now, when these destructive energies are met and coped with in the manner I discuss, this nucleus dissolves. In other words, the currents of energy are no longer compressed.

As you become more aware of yourself in this work, you do come to the point – and many of my friends already have experienced this – where this compressed energy is felt in the middle of the body like a foreign body. It is literally felt as a foreign body inside, a hard core.

If your emotional attitudes dissolve it – and your physical attitudes as well, for they are an expression of the emotional attitudes – you will feel this foreign body dissolve into its fluid energy. You will experience this as extremely pleasurable, and that there are many, many, many degrees of that. It is a state of being, of flowing, of being at one with the universe.

You will feel it almost like a physical taste. You will have a taste in your body and in your mouth. You will see differently; you will perceive differently; things will look different; you will see much clearer.

Whatever you will experience will have a different tone, a different color. This biologic force is originally a spiritual force – it is the same. And it comes from the inner nucleus, the real self, where these wonderful feelings flow perpetually as a continuum. This is one aspect of the real self.

The other aspect of the real self is the knowing the truth that is in there. Both can be and should be activated, because that is the self-realization. That is the goal of this life, in any life, and this work and this Path. Now some people concentrate on the one aspect of the feelings, of the total experience that each human being is capable of and everyone senses and longs for.

A few take the steps and say, “Well, it may be a reality.” But some, unfortunately, resign and think this reality is unattainable and it may be an illusion. But everyone knows of it. Everyone remembers it somewhere, deep in the depths of the spirit.

This memory is not gone from you, my friends. This blissful state of total pleasure exists in your memory. And it can only be attained in human life in the state of love and union with the opposite sex.

The other aspect, the second aspect of the real self, is being in contact with the truth of all being, the universal truth. It is possible that one person can only have this one side of it and others only the other. But both major aspects exist, and full self-realization means that.

This is what I can say and I realize it is extremely limited, for the words cannot describe it, just as you cannot describe in words a color or a taste or the feeling of pleasure you experience when you love and unite. These feelings and experiences are not really transmissible in words.

But some words may open somewhere a door within yourself that your longing can become more than a longing – that it can become first a vague gleaning and then the first sense of experience. This is a wide-open field, infinitely expandable. There is no set goal.

Once that’s said, the real self begins to be realized once the afflictions have been overcome. The expandability of the real self, of the degrees of bliss and delight, of the degrees of more creative unfoldment and knowing and experiencing truth, are infinite.

QA229 QUESTION: I’m very afraid of letting myself go into softness. I feel on the threshold of that. I feel it has a lot to do with my self-will. I also confuse activity and relaxation with a rigidity in being active and then just collapsing. Somehow I feel all these things are very crucial to me.

ANSWER: Yes. I would say the undercurrent of this dilemma you describe is an attitude of demandingness that you need to see perhaps more clearly. I know that you are aware of it to some extent, but you do not apply it to the areas, for example, of this dilemma and what is contained in this demandingness.

If you explore this voice that demands and is angry if you do not get, then you will resolve this. Then you can take on the reason and the decency that will filter through from your divinity, in which you will allow others to not have to give you this or that. You will have also the reason, the wisdom, and the decency to trust that things will be all right, even if you do not get exactly your way. And that attitude too can be yours already, if you so choose.

Many of you, my friends, have come to the point when you can indeed choose a new attitude. Before you are aware, you cannot choose.

QA242 QUESTION: About a week and a half ago, my very dear friend’s son was killed in a fall down an elevator shaft. I lived with this boy and his parents for three years, in the same house, in the same family. Somehow I know that for me his death has a great deal of meaning. I think it has something to do with decision-making and fear of the unknown and courage. I wonder if you can help me find the meaning for myself here.

ANSWER: Of course this soul’s decision to leave this Earth plane has elicited very basic fears in you that you need to explore. These fears are not just – although they include, of course – the fear of death, as you say, and the fear of the unknown, but it is much rather, in a perhaps slightly different way, the fear of falling, the fear of letting go, on the feeling level.

It is as though your most primitive distortions and fears were confirmed by this occurrence. For on some level you are saying, “If I let go of my feelings, if I surrender to all of my involuntary processes – to loving men, to loving my sexuality, to loving my lovingness, saying Yes to my heart beat, to not needing to be in control and in possession at all times of all my faculties – if I do this, I will perish in a most tragic action.”

That feeling pollutes the positive experience that this is also for you. It is a positive experience for you because in your soul you really know that all of this had to be and has a deep meaning that is right for all concerned – and somewhere, you know that. But you do not let yourself have this positive experience and the positive pain about it. The pain becomes terrifying and maudlin because of this other meaning that I just explained. And if you can connect with that, you can clean and clear this up.